This is a university project for the course ‘Construction and display’.
In this university project, the assignment was to take an everyday object out of its natural
environment and bring it to life. I chose a chessboard, since the idea of a living one intrigued
me. In this scene, I wanted to show the last, dramatic moment in the fight that chess is
normally abstractly depicting. It’s the last move, ending the game.
In this course, I worked with Blender. In the blockout I played around with scale and the camera
positions. This was important to get a feeling for how the scene should be constructed, to allow
a good readability of the scene and also a dramaturgy that intensifies the moment. The
conclusion of these was that the scene setting elements (f. ex. the clock) were best placed on
the right, in line with European reading conventions. Then from left to right you can see the
acting piece piercing the passive piece, the eyes being further led by the point of the spear.
All of which was to intensify the moment and bring the struggle to life.
The different armor and set pieces were designed and modeled by myself, using common box
modeling techniques. The Chain mail was made using the at the time completely new geometry nodes
(the whole project was made in Blender 2.93). The lighting setup is also quite simple, which
really emphasizes the textures on the models. It consists just of a hero light and a supporting
ambient light.
Bapehead
In this wonderful Workshop led by Raphaël de Courville and Elena Falomo, we worked on enhancing
things with augmented reality. Since I’m really interested in Digital and Analog Clothing, I
decided to work on one of my clothing items. The
item itself, a Crewneck from Bape’s S/S 2020 Collection featuring a print reminiscent of Neo
Tokyo from ‘Akira’, one of my favourite movies, features a badge on one of the sleeves
containing a QR Code.
Sadly the code isn’t scannable, so I thought, that this workshop would be the perfect
opportunity, to remedy this. Through the very fun prototyping process, which combined physical
and digital tools, I quickly landed on an interesting concept. The idea was to create a helmet
reminiscent of a motorcycle helmet as a nod to the infamous chase scenes in the movie
I also wanted to add a metal arm as a reference to Tetsuo’s final transformation. To fit with
Bapes theme, both were made to look ape-like, so f.ex. arm was planned to look like it came from
a cyborg gorilla. Sadly, it had to be scrapped during production, due to the limitations of
Spark AR at the time, which only supported 2 Dimensional overlays on the body.
After modeling, I added the helmet to Spark AR with two little animations I made in Blender. You
can switch these out by tapping on the screen while viewing the AR Lens on Instagram. Both of
these are holograms, glitching in front of the helmet. I also added an HDRI to simulate the
Helmet being actually in Neo Tokyo. If you want to check it out for yourself, you can do so with
the QR code at the end of the slideshow.
Artificial Intelligence
This is a project for the university course ‘Information design’.
AI will be one of the defining technologies of the future. Despite that, most people don’t have
a good understanding of these programs and their underlying mechanisms, creating problems where
the two clash. That’s why on this project we decided to make AI easy to understand, both its
limitations, and its potential as a tool. To do this, we designed a website which aims to
explain AI as simple as possible.
To make the issue easily approachable, we designed our helpful guide to this topic: Robbie.
He guides the user through the website and the short film explaining the topic. This makes it
easy for people of all ages to get into the topic without feeling overwhelmed.
He also shows you around all the different possible futures and current applications, as well as
shortfalls of the technology.
Since AI or rather Machine Learning is a technology, that’s already very much in use, we also
wanted to add a practical example for the user. That’s why we rebuild one of the oldest ML
examples, a number identification neural network. This NN can be trained while in use and is
thus able to show a Neural Network in its different training stages. This helps the user get a
feel for how important the data set is to the functionality of the Neural Network.
The project was prototyped in Figma and the Neural Network was build on a local server on the
basis of
this example
. My gratitude goes out to Franto Shajel, for providing the resources to learn about
this Neural Network.
This project was made with Sören Weinstein and Silas Diessner
Ryo Fukui - Early Summer 1976
This is a university project for the course ‘Audiovisual Design’.
Here we have used a systematic approach in combination with different analytical techniques to
translate a musical sequence into a semantic system. We chose the free Jazz track ‘Early Summer’
by Ryo Fukui to visualize. It’s a piece of free jazz, which transports the listener into another
world. To reflect this, we constructed a system, in which the viewer is able to immerse
themselves in the piece. This lets the viewer analyze and explore themselves, transforming the
song into an interactive experience.
This was done using various JavaScript techniques. The background for example, is run by its own
audio visualization script, transforming its color to the beat of the drums.
The spheres are all run via the musics' Soundwave in Blender, which controls their height. Then
they were brought into three.js, which allows them to be experienced interactively in the
browser. There, you can orbit around the piece as it plays. You can also stop at interesting
points in the song, allowing you to see the movement frozen in time.
Through the programmatic approach to creating this visualization, it would even be possible to
scale the system up to different songs. This makes it a tool, which can be applied to the
analysis of a wide variety of different songs, even in other genres.
This project was made with Lucie De Hair and Anton Wendel.
